Fantasy sports have enjoyed a longer and more consistent growth over the three decades since they were introduced largely due to their inherent virality. Because of their reliance on public statistics generated either daily or weekly, fantasy sports contests are inherently asynchronous, which is to say that they do not require any two persons competing to be in the same vicinity as one another to play. Even more importantly, they rely upon and foster growth of a community of competitors.
For purposes of clarity within this discussion, certain terms will be defined for use within this description.
A “User” is an individual, preferably registered on a server, who engages in game play as a manager competing within any fantasy sport hosted on the server.
An “Instigating User” is one of the Users who designates at least one other User (typically, an “Invited User”) to the server, thereby to initiate a fantasy sports competition.
A “Player” is any athlete or other individual competing in a real-live sporting event from which statistics are garnered, examples of which are baseball players, basketball players, soccer players, football players, race car drivers/race cars, mixed martial artists, etc.
A “Season” is any defined interval of competition between Users. The season may coincide with a season as recognized by the governing authorities of the various sports or it may be one defined by the Users, such as a single day of competition. Seasons can even span multiple years, if the Users so define the Season. Any interval of play for which statistics can be reliably garnered may be defined as a season by the Users.
Fantasy sports often involve team sports and the draft process requires various player positions to be filled. The number of Players a User claims is dependent upon the rules of the sport the Player is playing and/or the manner in which each individual fantasy sports game is devised, and would therefore be any number of Players.
Fantasy sports are any of several games where Users manage a roster of Players drawn from any group for whom statistics are compiled. In each of the possible sports ranging from NFL football to MLS soccer to NASCAR racing and those many other sports for which news sources publish statistics, a fantasy sport game exploiting those statistics can be devised. Users rely upon their ability to acquire and field a team of athletes pursuant to such rules as the group of Users define or adopt. Users compete against one another receiving points for their acquired Players' real life statistics as the Players compete in their real-life sports. Any injury or other impediment a Player suffers in the season is reflected in the resulting statistics a Player garners for the season in question. Similarly, any particularly good performance will shift a Player's statistics upward. In short, just as a real-life general manager in a sport must contend with the vagaries of the performance of human athletes that make up his team, so, too, does the fantasy sports User. As such, the fantasy player User gets to sample, vicariously, the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” by imparting a personal stake in each Player's performance.
The advent of powerful computers and the Internet revolutionized fantasy sports, allowing scoring to be done entirely by computer, and, thereby, allowing leagues to develop their own scoring systems, often based on less popular statistics. In this way, for example, fantasy baseball has become a sort of real-time simulation of baseball, and allowed many fans to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how the real-world game works. According to statistics from a 2009 article in Forbes, nearly 11 million people play fantasy baseball today, in all fantasy sports, Ad Week estimates nearly 32 million people.
Determining standings in a season generally occurs at fixed intervals because standings rely upon statistics derived from diverse events. For example, baseball games may occur three times a week for one team and as many as five times a week for another team and the schedule will vary from week to week. A User may have team members drawn from each of several teams with distinct schedules and match ups. Thus, algorithms used for generating standings may be updated, for example, either daily or weekly.
Because scores rely upon diverse games to make up any one User's standing, the play of fantasy sports is inherently asynchronous, which is to say that two Users will not necessarily know at the same time what scores they have derived from a week of play. Unlike watching an event such as the Super Bowl, two fantasy sports Users will not generally come together to watch a single event as their individual standings may not rely upon that event. Standings do not require any two persons competing thereby to be communicatively connected to each other to play, once each User has drafted his or her team. The draft is the one occasion for gathering the Users in a league, into each other's presence or at least in communication over a computer network.
Generally, as the play in all fantasy sports centers on the manager's staffing decisions, the teams are rated on the performance of each of a roster of athletes and the associated statistics they accumulate as the season progresses. As such, the original draft and subsequent trades present User managers with their scoring opportunities. Users, as managers, often draft teams before the season begins (or very shortly thereafter). One conventional approach is to hold an auction, whereby each User as manager has a fixed amount of money to bid for athletes, and he must fill his team's roster within their budget. Another conventional approach is to perform a serpentine system draft of available athletes until all teams are filled. Because selecting and trading athletes is the key issue that defines the play of any fantasy sports game relative to mark performance as against other manager Users, each variant that changes that process creates a distinct game.
Conventionally, fantasy sports have Users organized into leagues. One such league in fantasy baseball is known as the Roach Motel League, founded in 1981 at Columbia University in New York. Original Rotisserie League member Glen Waggoner was an administrator at Columbia and he passed along the rules to a group of undergraduates. The Roach Motel League, still consisting primarily of original members, has held a draft and played the game every year since 1981. But, absent such an infrastructure, there is no good way to organize head-to-head or three-way competition where there is not enough available Users to populate an entire league. Because league play is also rather slow, it would be advantageous for any user to have the opportunity to play in several distinct groups. Nonetheless, a User may not wish to order their choices to actually participate in distinct Player drafts for each group.
Although computers and networking have greatly expanded the ability for geographically diverse players to engage in fantasy sports contests, the game play is largely one in which drafts occur at the beginning of a season and late-comers are left out. Conventional computer systems and rules are not equipped to handle a spur-of the moment challenge between any two individuals, including Users who are randomly assigned or who otherwise have not participated in a mutual draft. Certain daily draft contests allow players to choose groups of athletes and compile a score based on the statistics of those athletes, but this form of game play is not truly head-to-head, and allows common or overlapping selections of players and an anonymous contest more similar to a lottery than an actual game.